St John’s Mews brings a townhouse inspired collection less than a mile from the centre of Wakefield offering flexible homes designed for modern family living.
The original site had been the West Yorkshire Police headquarters and our initial engagement was to act as principal contractor to complete the majority of site demolition and ground remediation.
At the start of our works only approx. 30% of the demolition and remediation of the former site had been completed so our first job was to act as principal contractor for 14 weeks and take charge of managing and carrying out works but working with an ongoing demolition and remediation project.
After extensive investigation it soon became apparent that apart from the potential underground obstructions there were many plots with extremely deep foundations. We undertook the appraisal and design and introduced a cost saving Insulslab raft solution.
Connaught also redesigned the outfall utilising an existing manhole which allowed planned surrounding road closures to be abolished and an abandoned mineshaft was discovered during the earthworks construction which was safely exposed by Connaught and capped off.
In addition, local planning authorities had produced plans requiring that ground excavations across the site had to be excavated to the proposed bottom of construction, plus a further 2m deep and 2m wider than the road needed to be and then replaced with compacted hardcore. Connaught undertook a series of trial holes across the site and proved that in most areas this was not warranted resulting in reduced import /export and further costs savings to the developer.
